Mom jailed for keeping hidden baby in bed drawer for three years

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A baby girl in the U.K. who spent her first three years living alone, sleeping in a drawer and being fed through a syringe is said to be recovering from her various physical and mental traumas.

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Her mother, who kept the child’s existence hidden from family, friends and the girl’s siblings, was sentenced this week to seven years and six months after pleading guilty to four charges of child cruelty.

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To protect the victim, neither she nor members of her family have been identified.

“This child has been subjected to extreme neglect of her health, development, and basic care needs since before she was born,” the Crown Prosecution Service’s Rachel Worthington said.

According to the CPS, authorities in Cheshire in northwestern England were first alerted to the case in February 2023 when the woman’s at the time partner went back inside the normally locked home to use the washroom and heard what sounded like a baby crying upstairs.

“He followed the noise and discovered a child of almost three years old with a cleft palate, matted hair and clearly malnourished.”

CPS said the man was shocked by the discovery and told his mother, who then informed the defendant’s mother, leading to police and a social worker dispatched to the home.

The mother led the social worker around the high bed where she said she was “taken aback” by a baby sitting in “a divan drawer” and “rocking back and forth.”

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“I looked at her mum and asked, ‘Is this where you keep her?’ The mother replied matter of factly, ‘Yes in the drawer,’” the social worker said during court proceedings.

“I was shocked the mother did not show any emotion and appeared blasé about the situation. I asked ‘Had anyone else ever seen (the child)?’ Mum stated ‘no.’”

The social worker then realized the “overwhelming horror” that hers was likely the only human face the child had seen other than her mother’s.

As a result of the neglect, doctors found that the 35-month-old’s physical and mental development had suffered significantly to the point where she “was the equivalent of a 10-month-old.”

With “floppy limps, swollen feet in an abnormal position, and poor muscle bulk” she wasn’t able to crawl or walk. In addition to her palate issue, she also had a swollen abdomen and diaper rash and was “malnourished, unkempt and dehydrated.”

She didn’t respond to her own name and could not “talk or make any communicative noises.”

After two weeks in hospital, CPS said the child “was vocalising, seeking adult comfort and crying to make her needs known.” Now in foster care, according to BBC, the girl has had two surgeries to correct her palate, but will require more.

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The social worker first on the scene called it the most “extreme case of blatant child neglect and cruelty” she’s experienced in her career.

Worthington said she and her team found the file difficult to work on.

“After reading the evidence, I had to take myself away and try and process what I had read,” she said.

I am a mother myself and simply couldn’t comprehend what this defendant had done or why

Under questioning, the mother revealed she’d been involved in an allegedly abusive relationship with the child’s father and didn’t tell him she was pregnant.

When birthed in a bathtub at the Cheshire home in early 2020, the girl was born with a cleft palate. Her mother initially fed the child herself, but “for a reason that the (CPS) was never able to establish, she decided to place the baby in a drawer in her divan bed and leave her there.”

“She came back now and again to feed her milky Weetabix through a medicine syringe and change the child’s nappies.“

During the trial, the court also learned that while the baby was “alone for hours on end,” the mother was living an otherwise normal life, going to work and taking her other children to school, with none of them aware of their sister’s presence in the shared home.

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At sentencing, Judge Steven Everett compared the little girl’s life to a “living death in that room” and that the mother’s actions “totally defied belief,” as reported by BBC.

“You attempted to control this situation as carefully as you could but by sheer chance your terrible secret was discovered,” he said.

“I don’t remember a case as bad as this in my 46 years.”

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